Divine Comedy by Craig Raine

...The Divine Comedy announces its high aspiration; in addressing them, it exemplifies the pertinent truth that performance is not always equal to desire.
-Guardian

Synopsis

The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.

Craig Raine is Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, and editor of Arete, a tri-quarterly arts magazine. Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist, and editor, Raine has been a powerful voice and an adversarial, intellectually independent figure in the literary world for the last40 years.